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Re: textbook touchstones



And guess what I am looking for when examining a new textbook?
I hope to see a mention (or at least a footnote) on distribution of
equilibrated charges on capacitors in series. Such charges are not
equal, unless leakage resistances happen to be identical. Authors
of two widely used (and often reedited) textbooks saw my demos
and agreed with the obvious conclusion about the inequality of
charges. They promised to address the issue "in the next edition".
That was five five years ago.
Ludwik Kowalski

...one of my fave typo checks as a reviewer for physics texts is:
"How do they misspell KIRCHHOFF?"
...the other one is, do they fudge the sign of centripetal acceleration
and how?

For physics texts, I check to see if the useless mention of disorder
is made in the introduction to entropy, and in astronomy I always look
for a listing of James Bradley in the index.